This is what effort looks like.
This is also what the difference between playing a top defense and a young team that struggles at defense looks like.
The payoff is somewhere in between these two realities.
Yes, the Detroit Pistons are a bad team and it’s preseason. These are all things to take into account until November 2nd gets here and we get to duel at 10 paces with the Sacramento Kings. But we should still love the effort we saw from a Love-less basketball team. Continue Reading…
The annual NBA GM survey was released on NBA.com today and as per usual, it’s kind of confusing in places and complimentary in others.
The Wolves were mentioned quite a bit throughout the survey of the 30 GMs around the league, and you know it was outside forces voting nice things about the Wolves because you’re not allowed to vote for your own team or personnel. Some of the nice things said about the Wolves: Continue Reading…
I’ve made the case before that Derrick Williams’ development–either in becoming a consistent three or being traded for one–is essential to the Wolves’ coherence. With a consistent, dynamic wing scorer, the Wolves’ newly acquired white boy stew actually makes sense; without it, the team still feels to me haphazard and misshapen, an oblong collection of Stiemsmas and Shveds and Budingers and Kirilenkos.
I still hold to that notion, but if you want a genuine picture of incoherence, you should try that same collection of players without Kevin Love at its center. Because the Wolves’ lineup that showed up in Chicago on Friday night was about as wayward and rudderless as a team could be. Of course, in terms of sheer gloomy apathy this crew doesn’t hold a candle to last season’s daydreamy Wes Johnson/bored Anthony Randolph nadir. But when it comes to not-an-actual-NBA-team lineup collage, its pretty hard to beat the Wolves’ Barea/Roy/Kirilenko/Cunningham/Stiemsma starting five. Or how about this one: Conroy/Shved/Budinger/Williams/Amundson? I don’t even know what those words mean but those dudes did actually share the floor during Friday night’s third quarter. Anyway.
After tonight, we’ll be halfway through the preseason madness, which means we’re halfway to the start of the regular season. Hooray for hoops!
I don’t know that there is much I have to say after last game that won’t be said in a Pekovic article I’ve got posting sometime tomorrow. So I’ll turn your attention to the Hollinger forecast for the Wolves he posted today. He’s got the T’Wolves finishing 45-37, third in the division, and seventh in the Western Conference. This sounds like a pretty great scenario for the Wolves.
We don’t need to get into a lot of preseason predictions but every advanced stats person seems to be projecting the Wolves for big things this year. And by big things I mean making the playoffs and winning a healthy number of games. Here’s an excerpt from the Insider article from Hollinger:
The biggest reason for optimism in Minnesota has less to do with Rubio and Love, and more to do with Darko and Johnson.
Here’s why: If the Wolves can just replace all the crappy players they used last season with average ones, they should have a really good team. It’s pretty amazing how many minutes this team gave players who had no business being in a rotation, let alone prominently figuring in one. Milicic started 23 games; Johnson, unbelievably, started 64.
That’s not all. Go down the list, and you’ll see Tolliver, Milicic, Johnson, Ellington and Webster all had single-digit PERs, and those five players played nearly 5,000 combined minutes. Beasley and Williams killed the Wolves with their shot selection, but they played another 2,500. That’s 7,500 minutes devoted to nonperformers. To put that in perspective, it nearly quadruples Love’s playing time.
This season the Wolves are replacing a lot of that performance with real basketball players: Kirilenko, Budinger, Shved, Cunningham and Stiemsma all should be improvements on the players they replaced. The new wing players provide particularly massive upgrades, while also allowing the Wolves to play a more traditional backcourt. (They started two point guards for most of last season because the wings were so bad.)
While I don’t have high expectations for Roy, anything he gives them will be gravy. And then there’s Williams, who one has to think will show more shot discipline (and, hopefully, accuracy) in his sophomore season.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there, so I recommend clicking the link and checking out John’s entire preview (if you have Insider, of course). I’m trying to remain cautiously optimistic. Over/under for Wolves’ wins this year seems to be around 39.5 for a lot fo places and I think 40 or 41 seems like a fair estimation without going overboard. If Rubio was going to be healthy all year, I’d be through the roof and being completely insufferable preaching the Wolves’ success.
But alas, I can’t bring myself to those lofty exultations just yet.
For today’s 3-on-3, I brought back Noam Schiller of Hardwood Paroxysm. He’s a noted Israeli basketball fan, who loves cheering for a horrible Hapoel team. That Hapoel team employs old friend, Craig Smith. He knows the Wolves’ opponents tonight better than just about any basketball writer there is out there. I also had Steve McPherson come back for some 3-on-3 action, mainly because he’s a newbie to the site and didn’t have a choice he just did a great email exchange with Noam about the matchup and the greater state of everything Minnesota and Israel basketball.
Let’s get it on. Continue Reading…
It wasn’t a pretty preseason opener in many ways, but the Wolves got to debut some new faces and beat up on an incomplete Pacers team for the victory.
Between the poor 3-point shooting, the grainy Fargo television feed coming through NBA League Pass, lots of turnovers, and a lot of missed free throws, it would have been pretty easy to want to look away from our first glimpse at what the Wolves have to offer this year. Plus, D.J. Augustin was the main point guard for Indiana due to George Hill sitting out and nobody wants to watch him play starter’s minutes. However, we got to watch Wolves basketball once again and it was pretty fun to see the new direction the team is going.
I’m not going to try to find an overarching storyline with a preseason game and look for how it affects the team moving forward. It’s preseason after all. So let’s just try to look at what each individual player did and file it away for later use. Continue Reading…
There is a lot of coach speak out there in which fans are forced to read between the lines. And it makes a lot of sense. You’re not going to give away strategies and team philosophies at will on most nights, especially during the regular season.
You can’t let the opponent for that night or for future nights know exactly what you’re thinking and how you view your strengths and weaknesses. It’s stuff they can probably figure out on their own, but you don’t want to do the legwork for them. But with Rick Adelman, there is an overwhelming sense of honesty that seems to come from his talks with the media. Continue Reading…
Kevin Love showed off his gold medal today during a press conference at the Target Center. He broached many topics from what the experience meant to him this summer to how he feels about the team heading into this year, Pekovic’s new look, and his nerves for throwing out the first pitch of the Yankees-Twins game at Target Field Wednesday night.
As per usual with Kevin, he was incredibly candid and had no problems expressing his thoughts on the subjects he was asked about. Here is my transcription of today’s presser and discussion afterwards along with some photos from myself and Steve McPherson (guess which ones are taken with his nice camera and which ones are taken with my iPhone): Continue Reading…
When is the last time this organization had toughness?
Perhaps Kevin Garnett wasn’t the epitome of a bar fight — despite what he may have blurted out at Craig Sager — but he at least feigned an attitude of some mental toughness, whether he was actually ready to risk a suspension or not. But pure brute strength and toughness is not something we’re used to seeing on our end of the floor at the Target Center. We’re not used to seeing everybody trying to figure out how to deal with the big guy on our team. We’re not used to seeing a little scrap break out and an opponent from the other team immediately go joke with our big guy to make sure he doesn’t get involved.
In the course of about eight months, Pek went from being an overmatched backup big man to the Chuck Norris of the NBA. Continue Reading…
In the interest of full disclosure, I really wanted Nikola Pekovic to win Most Improved.
This isn’t just because he’s a T’Wolf or because I’m terrified he’ll give me the guillotine if I don’t say this. I appreciate the fact that he went from being a borderline “we can’t play this guy at all” player his rookie season to the other team thanking Tebow when the rare moments Pek got into foul trouble. For some reason, I wanted the words “most” and “improved” to actually mean “most” and “improved” when we looked at Most Improved Player this season.
Ryan Anderson has won MIP because he played more minutes and took more shots this season on a playoff team. That’s it. This isn’t a jealousy thing and this isn’t a biased homer thing. Ryan Anderson was exactly as good last year as he was this year, except this year he had a different role on the team.
It’s not even that I think Pekovic deserves the honor more; it’s that I think Ryan Anderson doesn’t deserve it at all. Some people will claim Anderson helped Orlando win games and that’s why he earned the award. They’ll claim his defense was much improved and his rebounding was better. I don’t buy it. Continue Reading…
I like to talk about how a game’s unfolding–its ebbs and flows, the processes that shape its outcome, the feeling and texture of the performances–are more interesting to me, and ultimately more important than its final result. And I’ll stick to that assertion. Nevertheless, and despite any pretensions to journalistic professionalism (which, not too many) I will admit this: I really want the Wolves to win.
I desperately, nauseously wanted them to win when KG was hammering away at the Lakers and Kings. I wanted them to win when they were slouching toward the lottery under Wittman, McHale and Rambis, draft positioning be damned. I wanted them to win when Rubio and Love were lighting hearts on fire. And although there’s supposedly nothing to play for at the moment, although the Wolves are fielding a raggedy crew of misfits and loners, many of whom likely won’t wear a Wolves uniform again after Thursday, I still want them to win now.
And so despite it all, despite the fact that I’m a grown man watching a bunch of young dudes play a game on TV, watching the Wolves, for the second time in a month, fritter away a 20-point lead to the grievously undermanned Golden State Warriors, I found myself: groaning, sighing, clasping my face in my hands, noticing feelings of dread rise in my gut. I don’t care that it was the penultimate game of a long-destroyed season; it still felt terrible.
They lost this game because they simply could not score in the second half. (20 points in the third quarter, 13 in the fourth, 25% shooting for the half: that’s about as close to zero as it gets in the NBA.) You can expect that a team that boasts Klay Thompson, Brandon Rush and Charles Jenkins (who is shooting 32.9% over the past 10 games but is evidently the greatest point guard in the NBA when he is being guarded by J.J. Barea) will begin hitting shots at some point in a game. But the Warriors employed what is now a familiar late-game defensive strategy against our Love-less Wolves: choke the Barea/Pekovic pick-and-roll by exaggeratedly sagging into the paint (in the process deterring people like Michael Beasley and Anthony Randolph from getting to the rim); wait for the Wolves to start taking and missing outside shots. Full stop.
But I don’t want to burden you with gory details. We all know this crew is capable of some truly ungodly basketball. Let’s talk about the elements of this game that bear some relevance to the Wolves’ future.